The bandwidths, complexities, and capacities of modern distributed computer systems have increased enormously during the past several decades. Millions of personal computers, mobile devices, and other processor-controlled user appliances are currently interconnected with one another by the Internet, on a global scale, and interconnected with thousands of distributed-computing systems that provide entertainment content, information, services, retailer transactions, and other services to users of processor-controlled user appliances. Electronic commerce and electronic marketplaces have grown from relatively small and crude initial retailing websites, that first appeared in the 1990's, to handling a significant percentage of retail and commercial transactions.
The rise and rapid evolution of distributed-computing-implemented services and retailing has generated many additional types of electronic services and service-provision systems. As one example, electronic retailers routinely employ third-party web-analytics services in order to collect data with regard to user interaction with web sites and to analyze the data in order to improve the retailing efficiency of websites. In certain cases, the third-party web-analytics services instrument the HTML files, script files, and other types of encodings of web pages and then receive and process data forwarded by the instrumentation, executed within user browsers on remote user appliances, to web-analytics-service-provider data centers. The web-analytics service providers also generally provide clients with the ability to design and run various types of experiments within the context of which the instrumentation-produced data is collected and subsequently used to design, refine, and deploy various types of effective and efficient web sites. E-commerce retailers and electronic service providers continue to seek new types of data-collection and data-analysis methods and systems to further their goals in electronic commerce and other types of electronic services.